Meter as Rhythm

Drawing on insights from the modern "process" philosophy of Bergson, William James, and A. N. Whitehead, Christopher Hasty's Meter as Rhythm releases meter from its mechanistic connotations and recognizes it as a concrete, visceral agent of musical expression. Hasty reinterprets oppositions of law and freedom, structure and process, determinacy and indeterminacy to form a theory that engages diverse repertories and aesthetic issues. The revised 20th anniversary edition facilitates the work's current contexts of application, from new subfields in ethnomusicology and music cognition to non-music fields like literary studies, physics, and biology.

Christopher Hasty's scholarly work engages problems in the theory and analysis of music from the 16th to the 20th centuries from the standpoint of process and experience. His book Meter as Rhythm (1997) won the Wallace Berry Award from the Society for Music Theory for the Outstanding Music Theory Book of the Year. His current research interests include process philosophy, poetic prosody, and ecological and post-cognitivist psychology.

PART I
METER AND RHYTHM COMPOSED
ONE
General Characterization of the Opposition
Periodicity and the Denial of Taste
Rhythmic Experience
Period versus Pattern; Metrical Accent versus Rhythmic Accent
TWO
Two Eighteenth-Century Views
THREE
Evaluations of Rhythm and Meter
FOUR
Distinctions of Rhythm and Meter in Three Influential American Studies
FIVE
Discontinuity of Number and Continuity of Tonal "Motion"
PART II
A THEORY OF METER AS PROCESS
SIX
Preliminary Definitions:
Begining, End, and Duration
"Now"
Durational Determinacy
SEVEN
Meter as Projection:
"Projection Defined"
Projection and Prediction
EIGHT
Precedents for a Theory of Projection
NINE
Some Traditional Questions of Meter Approached from the Perspective of Projective Process:
Accent
Division
Hierarchy
Anacrusis
Pulse and Beat
Metrical Types - Equal/Unequal
TEN
Metrical Particularity:
Particularity and Reproduction
Two Examples
ELEVEN
Obstacles to a View of Meter as Process:
Meter as Habit
"Large Scale Meter as Container (Hypermeter)
TWELVE
The Limits of Meter:
The Durational "Extent" of Projection
The Efficacy of Meter
Some Small Examples
THIRTEEN
Overlapping, End as Aim, Projective Types:
Overlapping
End as Aim
Projective Types
FOURTEEN
Problems of Meter in Early-Seventeenth-Century and Twentieth-Century Music:
Monteverdi, "Oime, se tanto amate" (First Phase)
Shutz, "Adjuro vos, filiae Jerusalem"
Webern, Quartet, op. 22
Babbitt, Du
SIXTEEN
The Spatialization of Time and the Eternal "Now Moment"